As though the person who sees a theft coming and quietly prepares to prove it is somehow the guilty party, and the person who commits the theft is merely unlucky to have been watched.

It is a very particular kind of mind that arrives there, and I have come to recognize it as the same mind that heard a decade of our father’s forgiveness and heard permission in it.

Leon genuinely could not distinguish between being loved and being allowed.

When our father rescued him, again and again, Leon did not experience it as mercy freely given by a man who could have chosen otherwise; he experienced it as confirmation that the money was rightfully his and the rescues were merely early installments.

And so, when the mercy finally stopped — when someone finally said no, not this time, this time there will be a consequence — it did not register to Leon as justice.

It registered as betrayal.